


This isn't another girl meets boy

by lbmisscharlie



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, F/M, Genderswap, Grief/Mourning, Sexism, Sherlock Holmes/Female John Watson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-30
Updated: 2013-08-30
Packaged: 2017-12-25 02:01:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/947290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lbmisscharlie/pseuds/lbmisscharlie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The thing is, if this were a story, Jo would fall in love with her best friend. </p><p>(And he with her)</p><p>Well –</p>
            </blockquote>





	This isn't another girl meets boy

**Author's Note:**

> This story started as a gut reaction to [this series of posts](http://lbmisscharlie.tumblr.com/post/58136943610/its-not-misogyny-sexwriting-and-the-gender-politics) on tumblr about gender in fic (I’m linking here to my own post, but there are a number of interesting threads throughout, so click liberally on the notes!) From there, with much help from my generous beta and friend, [peninsulam](http://archiveofourown.org/users/peninsulam), it became an actual story. 
> 
> Some inspiration for the structure must go to the wonderful Supernatural fic [the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep](http://traveller.livejournal.com/815713.html), and the title is from La Roux’s [I’m Not Your Toy](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew_c5ewoVQk).

The thing is, right – _the_ thing. Is. 

They’re not lovers, is the thing. Is. Was? Is. 

The thing is, Jo doesn’t miss him. She doesn’t: she aches, pain in the marrow of her bones; she sees him, at the edges of her eyes, shadowed by the jerking flutter of her eyelashes; she breaks him away from her like the rending of garments, like her skin torn, like cutting away something vital, and tucks him – somewhere else. 

But she doesn’t _miss_ him. How can she, when he haunts her?

++

You haven’t heard this one. _Don’t_ stop me.

++

It was a meet-cute almost nauseating in its perfection; later, Harry would laugh her throaty, too-raw laugh and say that she should write a romance novel, not a blog. Mike’s grin, his cheeks flushed – cherubic, Jo thought, perhaps a bit cruelly – and Sherlock’s slick-cool gaze and his top button, undone, and Jo’s hand, small and scarred around the unfamiliar weight of her – Harry’s – phone. 

Sherlock had even _winked_. For god’s sake. 

If it had been directed, though, under the soft-focus lens of romantic comedy, their montage would have had more shy meeting glances and accidental brushes of hands; as it was, it had Jo sticky with sweat, heaving breath punctuated by curses against the thin night air, and Sherlock, with his cruelly – happily – twisted mouth, not quite taking attention of her. Not quite aware of her presence.

He did leave her on a crime scene, after all. 

(But then, then – 

Then she killed a man.) (Does that count as a quirky, but endearing, flaw?)

++

He wasn’t as Byronic as his collar and his sweeping silhouette would suggest. Byron was a man, too, but Jo had trouble seeing a poet in the greasy, salt-sweat rankness of Sherlock’s hair after a week-long sulk on the sofa, in the slime slowly creeping across the second shelf of the fridge, in the petulant sweep of Sherlock’s lids, not fulsome enough to be an eye roll but dismissive enough to set Jo’s teeth to grinding. People gave him glances – seconds, thirds – but any hint of lustful interest dropped the moment he opened his mouth.

 _Eat your heart out_ , Jo would think to the turned heads, the licked, wet mouths, the downturned eyes. 

++

The thing is, if this were a story, Jo would fall in love with her best friend. 

(And he with her)

Well – 

++

She’d spent her life working to escape expectations, after all, but they bit – bite still – at her heels, insistent, and bayed with pleasure when she fell to her knees.

The email invitation had a garish header of violently pink lipstick kisses – a daytime telly makeover show, Connie Prince’s old slot, give the people what they want – _tasteful_ , it said, _a new wardrobe, haircut, indispensible makeup tips!_ Like she could hold the suggestions close – brush eyeshadow this way; see how this lipstick suits your colouring – and the knowledge would protect her. Catch a criminal in the sweep of her mascara, restart a heart with this season’s nail varnish shade, keep Sherlock from – from _everything_ – with just the right hairspray.

(Touchable but strong!)

“ _This_ is how they see me,” Jo said to the room, feeling too broad, too much, in her oilcloth jacket, in her tied-tight brogues. 

Sherlock’s scoff echoed; loud, dismissive. “Don’t be like that; they’re idiots.” _Practically everyone is._

Eminently fixable: her too-brash voice as a child; her headstrong mind as a teen; her medical school ambitions and her army training. None of them were properly female – _use your indoor voice; be a lady; why are you making a scene; what type of girl, what type of woman, what type of bitch do you think you are._ Her parents, her sister, her teachers, her superior officers, her therapist. 

Even Sherlock wasn’t immune. Her shoulder, her leg – _proving a point_ – her tremor, her _body_ : fixable. In need of fixing. For she had been broken, then, hadn’t she? Shattered, raw edges and large, visible cracks; not just chips in her veneer. Every voice she’d ever heard telling her how very _wrong_ she was, echoing in the extra thud of her cane against the ground; every sneer and pointed jab about _women_ , about _handling it_ , about how _they’re just not capable, are they_ stretching-reaching-spreading to her aching shoulder, to her quivering fingertips.

And then they were gone, those cracks, and Sherlock thought she was fixed.

She mistrusted her body for weeks after she met him, expecting every day a fall down the stairs, the clatter of teacup against saucer, a mess made by nerves unable to follow her command; and when her bone and sinew and muscle held steady, she mistrusted more, for liking it. For her feet slapping against the pavement and her breath heavy and panting and full and skipping the steps as she ran up them and giggling with the smell of blood fresh in her nostrils. 

His grin, above her in the hallway, haunts, floating up behind her eyelids, even now a taunt and a pleasure; conflicted comfort. She was more useful that way, she reasons, and she hates being _useless_. But how many more broken edges does she have, how many more fissures will crackle across her surface?

++

You want – so much. We all do. Happiness, for one. Pleasure. To be needed; to be useful.

To be.

_To know_ , Sherlock would say, _is all that’s important_. To feed the mind, voracious. Vicious. 

But that’s not quite enough, is it?

++

Their love scene, she thinks, might have been lit hazily at sunset. Their silhouettes through gauzy curtains, his arms strong about her (blemish-less) shoulders, her hands knit in his hair. Silk sheets tucked over her chest and about his waist.

Not the hazy, drugged stumbling of two people frightened and angry at being frightened; not a narrow single bed in the attic of a country inn; not Sherlock’s hands skittering, clammy, over her hips to grip, too tight, at her ribcage; not the abortive fumble for condoms neither of them had brought; not orgasms that left him irate, narrow chest heaving, and made her gut stumble and fall in delayed and shaking fear. Not two people in separate beds not sleeping, and speaking together in the morning like nothing had occurred. 

It wasn’t the sex she minded, so much, nor the seemingly agreed-upon silence; it was the loss of an emotion neither had sought, nor retained, gone astray somewhere in the cold stickiness of the sheets around her and far distant by the time morning broke. Comfort, fondness. Awareness, understanding. _To know_ , as Sherlock would say, though not about her.

If this were the movies, they’d overcome it. Try, try again. 

It’s not.

++

Her heart thudded so hard, so deafeningly hard, that she couldn’t hear her own voice. “Let me through, let me –” She could feel it, her pulse, in the raw-scraped balls of her hands, in the stiffness of her elbows, in her knees on the cold cement, but not in his wrist. Not in the fleeting touch of still-warm skin as the people around them, strangers all – “Let me through, he’s my – friend” – pulled her away, demanding. 

His blood on the pavement and his muscles too still, and she had seen worse: bodies torn asunder, gleaming and raw. The flash of china-white bone through crimson, through glistening ruby muscles and golden tendons, precious and fractured. Some reparable, some not.

She _had_ seen worse, she could – she could – it was her job, surely – 

_Let me through._

++

You think you know the story, of course. You’ll have read the papers, gleeful, devouring; you believe your opinion means something. A picture’s worth a thousand, and they’re splashed on every corner of London – ubiquity just another word for _inescapable_ – Hat-man and Robin, the Detective and his Lady, a noir fairy-tale twisted up in a hazy trail of cigarette smoke and the indulgent set of a woman’s lips.

(No one’s fooled. She’s no femme fatale.)

Sherlock would say you’re wrong ( _simple-minded, insignificant_ ); your thoughts don’t matter. He’d be right.

He always is.

Was.

++

 _They’ll turn. And they’ll turn on you_ , she’d said, like she was immune. Like she could edge away from the harsh glare of the spotlight at any time. 

The makeover show invitations don’t come anymore, after. Instead, the emails, the calls, the reporters at her front door ask – beg, cajole, plead, threaten – her to _tell her story_. To _reveal her secrets_. To talk, at length, of just how Sherlock entrapped her, not with chains but with words – and, they insinuate, perhaps more. To relay the horror.

To wear her victimhood about her like a mantle – widow’s weeds or bridal veil, it matters little. 

She tires of cursing at them after a day, begins deleting the emails without reading them, turns off her phone. Silence is complicity, Lestrade would tell her – does, shouldering his way into Baker Street and sitting across from her, uncomfortable in Sherlock’s chair, leaning to grip her knees in his hands like he has the right – then pulling away at her glare. Her grin to see her name tied with Sherlock’s, inextricable once more, is hollow, but victorious.

 _His Girl Friday_ , the newspapers decide; she’s been called worse. Whore-slut-dyke, her perceived preferences offensive within their imagined existence. Bitch-ballbuster-cunt, as though her existence was predicated upon the men she ran afoul of. Very few of the names she’s ever been called stick, even those closest to the truth. _Madwoman. Reckless._

++

Broken once more, she wonders dully if there’s anyone left to try to fix her. Old breaking points, but new fissures: Sherlock’s gleaming headstone, austere and mocking; one mug only in the sink and the remains of breakfast vomited up next to it; the sofa, empty, and her gun still in her drawer. Her hands, untrembling, but useless. Purposeless. 

The air at Baker Street, vast and thin, chokes her nonetheless.

She stays, still.

++

She’s saved lives. Soldiers, their blood pouring out sticky and hot over her hands, her sutures neat, her hands steady, their fragile flesh knit back together. 

Now, she gives immunizations, writes prescriptions for allergy medication, advises on diet and exercise – _running, running, feet slapping asphalt and shingled roofs rough under her palms and_ – bandages sprains, aluminium splints wrapped up neat. The surgery is cool and clean, antiseptic; it’s certainly not their scarred kitchen table, with its burns and acid scars and knife gouges, strong enough still to hold Sherlock’s thin frame, pale and clammy and trusting.

It’s another kind of life-saving, these quiet little steps, she tells herself. Does it matter? In the face of the blood on her hands – literal, Sherlock’s veins pouring out across his temple, soaking the pavement, and grimy on her hands well into the night – does it matter that she puts on plasters and listens to heartbeats and prescribes antibiotics?

When she couldn’t – when she – 

She trudges on, days cycling to months – one year, then two – and though her hands are busy (prevent, repair, patch up), her kit grows dusty under the kitchen sink.

++

You’ll have heard about his return, of course. How could you not, triumphant as it was: crowing. _Proving a point_ , again and again, with everyone else caught up in the mix. 

Not dead. _Not dead_. Reason enough for celebration, for triumph.

Happy endings only happen because the story isn’t finished yet.

Listen on.

++

Her hand smarts, to see him again, and she wonders if she punched him without realizing, hand working of its own accord. Not likely, not with his face searching, seeking, gaunter than she – than it had been – but skin unbroken, the crests of his cheekbones pale, cool. Her fingers clench, empty, at air. 

She closes the door, him on the other side.

++

Of course he finds her, for she isn’t hiding from him. It is – was – will be – his home as well, though she’s swept it clean of him, sealed him behind a door to a room she never enters; though she lives like a bachelor, single – singular – and quiet. 

“I apologise,” he says, and she thinks the words have never sounded worse on his lips. She lets him say it again though, again and again in so many ways – in explanations and exhortations, in the nervous silence broken only by the tap of his fingertips, and in the cracks of his broken lips and the sharpness of his bones. Swallowing his words – words, words – and gradually they go down more easily. 

She thinks, seeing his working jaw, his worried brow, his clenching, reaching hands, of how very different his presence – his actual corporeal, demanding form – is from that which had haunted her. How quiet, once it’s clear his apologies drop unwanted into the vastness between them; in her mind, these days and months and years, he’s never shut up. His words becoming her thoughts, her anger filtering through his indifference, her leg holding steady and her fingers flexed. 

She’d tried to peel him away from her, shed his presence and tuck it away as she had his books, his skull, his violin; she realizes now how he’s settled into her skin, and him, there, in front of her, is the abrupt tearing away of a scab she’d thought healed.

How very much she wants, at once, to forgive him: to press her cheek against the fine wool of his coat, to twist her fingers in the fabric of his shirt, to still his movement, to wet his shoulders with her tears. And yet – to send him away. 

She does neither, but leaves, lets the door slam, unlocked, behind her and grits her teeth against the spasming pain in her thigh at her brisk pace to the Underground, fumbles her Oystercard and settles into a corner seat on the Circle line. 

It twists through corners of London: people on, people off. Jo wills herself to feel anonymous, forgotten. 

++

You bustle through the veins of the city: on the train, off the train, shoulders brushing in the crowds. A queue for coffee, the newspaper purchased, eyes never quite making contact.

The world, to you, is small and complicated by your own intimate dramas. You pass through, and it changes around you – someone _not dead_ , someone broken again – and it matters little. Seismic shifts in the strata and you check your watch, thumb through your phone, grip a bit tighter to your handbag, your briefcase.

The train rumbles beneath your feet over unsteady ground.

_Mind the gap._  


++

In their life before, Sherlock had taken to chain-smoking, long, languid puffs creating a tormented miasma above his prone form on the sofa, until Jo had taken the pack of cigarettes, ground it pulpy beneath her heel on the kitchen floor, swept up the remnants, and dumped it out the kitchen window into the garden.

If Jo were a jealous sort, she might have minded that his indolence was over another woman. Really, though, if he was going to smoke himself to death, he could, at least, blow it out the window. 

In the row that followed – for days, weeks really – Sherlock’s face reached new heights of pliability as he attempted every woeful, cajoling, despondent, angry, hopeful, pleading, pathetic expression he’d ever pulled off another’s face; none worked, and he stayed on the patches.

She’s not surprised, therefore, to see his oh-so-familiar masks cycle over his malleable face as he tries on first apologetic, then mournful; accusatory then cowed; embarrassed then earnest: one after another each time he knocks on the door. She lets him in and makes him tea and asks him to leave once he’s finished; ritual. He drinks, and goes, and leaves his mug next to hers on the counter.

++

China can only handle so much rough wear. Chips turn to fissures turn to cracks and soon the whole thing shatters in your hands. Jo pours just-boiled water into mugs sturdy and yellowed with age, knowing that the damage at the edges will be familiar to her lips.

Sherlock takes his and doesn’t drink. They stand, uselessly, in the kitchen, where the air is humid. She should open a window, she thinks, and startles when he touches her. 

“Can I just –” He grips her elbow tight; this isn’t in the script. Their routine, the carefully composed ritual, doesn’t include this: his fingers desperate at the bones of her elbow joint, grinding, and his face something she’s only seen from the corners of her eyes, shadowed, escaping when she turns her head.

Something true.

Stumbling back, she wants to scrub at her eyes; they burn, hot with the flicker of tears, and her fists rise halfway but no further. Sherlock’s hand drops; his face clears; his shoulders settle, compose. Jo’s breath hisses between her teeth.

“Can you just _what?_ ” The word crackles in the ragged air. 

“Can I just _stay_ ,” he spits, like slapping her, like kissing her, like fear venomous in their veins. His hands are trembling; hers are still. _Fixable_ , she thinks.

Are they?


End file.
